You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

December 3rd

The year-long Republican legislative strategy of having every Republican find their shittiest idea, then throwing all the shittiest ideas into a pile, then taking out the ten least shitty of those ideas, then changing each of the shittiest ideas into a slightly shittier idea to appease each individual Senator without any of them knowing what any of the shitty ideas are, and doing this all over three days so that nobody has time to say “hey all these ideas are shitty maybe don’t do that?” finally worked.

It didn’t work the two or three or however many times they tried it with health care, although each time it almost worked. When it didn’t work, we all convinced ourselves that the Collinses and the Murkowskis were interested in good public policy, or that McCain decided he wanted to go out with an honorable legacy. And those were all delusions, of course.

This tax bill torpedoes Obamacare by repealing the individual mandate. It doesn’t replace it, it doesn’t fix it, it just shivs it in the back and leaves it in the gutter to die. Murkowski voted for it. Collins voted for it.

This tax bill was enacted with an order so irregular it has passages handwritten by lobbyists in pen in the margins. It has things scribbled out. John McCain, noble defender of regular order And The Way The Allegedly Most Deliberative Body Is Supposed To Work, voted for it.

They don’t have principles. They have power, and they have image, and every once in a while they’ll sacrifice one for the other or vice versa, and that’s all there is to it. And you can tell me that Democrats are just as bad, and just as unprincipled, and just as disingenuous, and I will tell you to go fuck yourself because even if that were true that wouldn’t be true, because the things they wield their power for AND the image they’re trying to maintain are both different and less execrable.

I’ll tell you this, no Democrat, not even in the shittiest, most corrupt, Joe Manchiny Democrat, would put a tax exemption for private jets into a bill. Even if he owned three private jets and all his friends owned three private jets. He'd just take a big bribe from a coal company and use that to pay for everyone’s tax bill. Even if the worst Democrat in the world wanted a private jet tax break more than anything else in the universe, they wouldn’t, because they know how shitty it looks and care, at the very least, about how it looks.

Every time they’ve tried this, it’s proven that congressional Republicans cannot be trusted to wield their power responsibly. Hell, they can’t even wield it correctly. Or appropriately. Or competently. And no, Obamacare didn’t get passed like this. I don’t care how much mythmaking the right has constructed around Nancy Pelosi’s “have to pass the bill to see what’s in it” line, This shit is unprecedented levels of bad.

Which means, as always, 2018. What this means is that you take their power away. And the way you take their power away is to suck it up and vote for whoever’s running against them. Vote for the farthest-left person in the primary, then the farthest-left person in the general. Vote for the lesser of two evils, consistently and at every possible point, because statistically, that’s the only way to reduce the average level of evil.

They’re awful people who are awful at their jobs, and nothing can get better until they’re replaced.